Editorial of IAA book Lebanon Communicating: 50 years of history of achievements

1. Lebanon Communicating:50 years of history and achievements
Editorial
1961 was the year the IAA Lebanon Chapter was created. It was also the
year my parents were married. I was born a few years later and raised in a
family who lived and breathed in sync with the developments of
communication; from television in the sixties to advertising in the
seventies.
I have been fortunate enough to witness the rise and success of the IAA and
the advertisementsector, over fiveincredible decades, and lucky enough to
have met or been acquainted with almost every single person named in this
book. The past fifty years have been exceptional on more than one level:
they kicked off with the first television station in the Arab world and are
ending with the exponential boom of social media.
Throughout these years, advertising has evolved in many ways: one-man
shows became heads of agencies, graphic designers who slaved over their
models with Letraset became creative geniuses, and those who left the
country becauseof the war, opened the doors of advertising in the Gulf and
built their own regional networks.
The Lebanese excelled in this domain, and advertising became an example
of a profession that succeeded in exporting itself and formed more than
one generation of young talented professionals. Things were not always
easy, especially with the outbreak of war in the seventies through to the
early nineties, bringing as it did waves of destruction, misery and a
multitude of deceptions.
But was the war a necessary evil? What would have become of the
advertising industry in the region if the Lebanese had not been forced to
seek new havens in the Gulf for their profession, export their know-how,
open new offices for their agencies, and become active participants in all of

2. the IAA’s conferences in order to prove that Lebanon was very much alive
and open to innovation?
Ironically, this turn of events opened the way for ambitious Lebanese
professionals to become the leaders of the most important regional
agencies in the region, for the election of four Lebanese men to head the
IAA worldwide in the space of 20 years, for the Golden Tulip award for the
best IAA Chapter in the world to be given to the Lebanese chapter in 1986,
and finally for the Lebanese chapter to organize the IAA World Congress in
Beirut in 2002.
It is with the aim of honoring these professionals of the advertising and
communications industry that the idea for this book arose. These include:
the early pioneers; those who made their way to the Gulf markets during
the war; those who chose to stay in Lebanon and develop the local market;
the creative ones who won awards; the copywriters who created historical
slogans; and the thousands of behind-the-scenes workers who contributed
to making our profession such a brilliant sector…
This book has no pretention of being an exhaustive account of the entire
history of the advertising sector in Lebanon. Rather, it aims to underline the
successes and achievements of the IAA Lebanon Chapter and the
advertising sector. It was no easy task, given the lack of references and the
loss of IAA archives in 1975, when its headquarters, located back then on
Patriarch Hoayeck Street, were destroyed. We contacted every player in
the field, and mostof them answered our calls, sharing with us their slice of
history and giving us a glimpse of their enriching experiences. Sadly,
however, not all of them did, and we hope our readers will not hold this
against us.
I invite you to read this book with an open-mind. Discover the forties and
fifties, immerseyourself in the sixties and seventies, relivethe rhythmof the
eighties, and the boom of the nineties! It is my sincerest hope that you will
enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it.

3. Naji Boulos
President IAA Lebanon Chapter